Delving into the Scent of Anxiety: Máret Ánne Sara Reimagines The Gallery's Exhibition Space with Reindeer Influenced Exhibit

Visitors to the renowned gallery are used to unusual experiences in its vast Turbine Hall. They've sunbathed under an simulated sun, slid down amusement rides, and witnessed robotic sea creatures hovering through the air. However this marks the initial time they will be venturing themselves in the detailed nose passages of a reindeer. The latest creative installation for this cavernous space—created by Native Sámi artist Máret Ánne Sara—invites patrons into a labyrinthine structure based on the scaled-up inside of a reindeer's nose airways. Once inside, they can meander around or chill out on pelts, tuning in on earphones to Sámi elders sharing stories and wisdom.

Why the Nose?

Why the nose? It might appear quirky, but the installation celebrates a rarely recognized natural marvel: scientists have found that in less than one second, the reindeer's nose can warm the ambient air it breathes in by 80 degrees celsius, enabling the animal to survive in extreme Arctic climates. Enlarging the nose to larger than human size, Sara explains, "generates a sense of inferiority that you as a individual are not in control over nature." She is a ex- journalist, writer for kids, and environmental activist, who hails from a reindeer-herding family in the Norwegian Arctic. "Maybe that fosters the chance to change your perspective or trigger some humbleness," she continues.

An Homage to Traditional Ways

The winding design is among various features in Sara's immersive exhibition celebrating the traditions, science, and worldview of the Sámi, Europe's only Indigenous people. Partially migratory, the Sámi count roughly 100,000 people ranged across northern Norway, the Finnish Arctic, Sweden, and Russia's Kola Peninsula (an territory they call Sápmi). They've endured persecution, integration policies, and repression of their tongue by all four nations. With an emphasis on the reindeer, an creature at the center of the Sámi belief system and origin tale, the art also highlights the community's challenges associated with the climate crisis, land dispossession, and imperialism.

Symbolism in Components

Along the extended entry slope, there's a looming, eighty-five-foot sculpture of pelts trapped by utility lines. It represents a metaphor for the societal frameworks constraining the Sámi. Partly a utility pole, part celestial ladder, this component of the installation, called Goavve-, relates to the Sámi name for an harsh environmental condition, in which dense sheets of ice appear as changing temperatures thaw and ice over the snow, encasing the reindeers' primary cold-season food, lichen. This phenomenon is a result of planetary warming, which is happening up to much more rapidly in the Arctic than elsewhere.

Previously, I visited Sara in Guovdageaidnu during a goavvi winter and joined Sámi reindeer keepers on their Arctic vehicles in freezing temperatures as they carried carts of supplementary feed on to the exposed Arctic plains to distribute manually. The herd gathered round us, digging the icy ground in vain for lichen-covered bits. This resource-intensive and laborious process is having a drastic influence on reindeer husbandry—and on the animals' natural survival. But the other option is death. As goavvi winters become routine, reindeer are succumbing—a number from lack of food, others drowning after sinking in water bodies through unstable frozen surfaces. In a sense, the work is a monument to them. "Through the stacking of materials, in a way I'm introducing the goavvi to London," says Sara.

Contrasting Perspectives

The installation also emphasizes the clear difference between the modern understanding of energy as a commodity to be harnessed for gain and livelihood and the Sámi worldview of energy as an innate essence in creatures, people, and nature. This venue's history as a fossil fuel plant is linked with this, as is what the Sámi see as eco-imperialism by Scandinavian states. In their efforts to be exemplars for renewable energy, Scandinavian countries have clashed with the Sámi over the building of turbine fields, hydroelectric dams, and extraction sites on their traditional territory; the Sámi assert their fundamental freedoms, ways of life, and traditions are threatened. "It's challenging being such a limited population to defend yourself when the justifications are rooted in saving the world," Sara observes. "Resource exploitation has appropriated the language of ecology, but nonetheless it's just attempting to find more suitable ways to persist in habits of expenditure."

Family Conflicts

The artist and her relatives have personally disagreed with the national administration over its ever-stricter rules on animal husbandry. A few years ago, Sara's sibling embarked on a sequence of ultimately unsuccessful court actions over the forced culling of his animals, apparently to stop overgrazing. To back him, Sara developed a four-year set of pieces named Pile O'Sápmi including a colossal screen of numerous cranial remains, which was exhibited at the 2017 art exhibition Documenta 14 and later acquired by the National Museum of Oslo, where it is displayed in the lobby.

The Role of Art in Advocacy

For numerous Indigenous people, art appears the sole domain in which they can be heard by people of other nations. Two years ago, Sara was {one of three|among a group of|